He was flawed, but he was the most captivating figure to occupy the Oval Office in our time.

President John F. Kennedy was flawed, as most presidents have been, even the best. But he was the most captivating figure to occupy the Oval Office in our time1962 Associated Press file photo

The country took a trip back in time last week to remember the life of John Fitzgerald Kennedy and to reassess his legacy and the meaning, if anything, of his murder.

Most of what we heard and read was probably right, but a good bit was malarkey, most notably the notion that, with Kennedy’s death, we “lost our innocence.”

If I read or heard it once, I read or heard it a dozen times and it never got any more believable — poetic, yes, but malarkey nevertheless.

Truth is, our species lost its innocence a long time ago, back when our first forebears were tossed out of the Garden of Eden over that business with the apple.

It’s been up and down for us ever since, a mix of magnificence and misery that reached a climax with the bloodiest but most economically bountiful century in history — the one we just escaped, the 20th century.

Kennedy himself was no believer in societal innocence, especially not as it applied to his own invulnerability — or any president’s — in a dangerous world. He warned his Secret Service protectors that a lone gunman willing to give his own life to kill a president would probably succeed. He got that right, for sure.

If Kennedy lives on in fond memory, the Warren Commission finding on how he died does not.

A cottage industry of conspiracy theories that reject the Warren report has sprung up in the half-century since the murder, an industry helped along by things such as Oliver Stone’s nefarious twisting of the truth in his film “JFK” and currently featuring a book by Roger Stone pinning the murder on Lyndon Johnson. (Something to do with guys named “Stone,” I guess).

I believe the Warren Commission came as close to explaining what happened on that horribly confused day as we can reasonably expect. Could be wrong, I suppose, but there is this to keep in mind: For all of the Kennedy murder’s shock-to-the-system nature, it actually followed a familiar pattern.

As in two of three previous murders of presidents — James Garfield and William McKinley — the killer was a lone gunman. The same was true in the failed attempts to assassinate three other presidents: Franklin Roosevelt, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan.

Abraham Lincoln’s slayer, John Wilkes Booth, was part of a conspiracy that failed to kill other members of his administration. But Booth was alone when he fired the fatal shot.

The more distant we get from the actual event — and the dimmer public memory becomes — the more fertile is the ground for conspiracy buffs. We’ll likely encounter more of that kind of thing in the years ahead.

But few of us are likely to ever again see the events in Dallas revisited as vividly as they were the past few days. There’s something magical about 50th anniversaries, but they come along only once.

On the other hand, Kennedy’s presidency will continue to be exhumed to examine what it — and more precisely he as a person — meant to the country.

He was not a great president, but he was not an insignificant one, either. He was flawed, as most presidents have been, even the best. But he was the most captivating figure to occupy the Oval Office in our time — the beau ideal of American politics — and he used his wit and charisma to kindle a new interest in government, as witness the success of his Peace Corps.

Kennedy was hardly the lefty liberals like to claim. He came late — though whole-heartedly — to the civil rights cause. And he won a major limitation on atmospheric nuclear testing. But he was also a fierce cold warrior whose masterful handling of the Cuban missile crisis is a case study in how to confront and defuse a national threat.

The great mystery of Kennedy’s presidency remains how he would have handled Vietnam.

There were only 16,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam when he died — all advisers, no combat brigades — but he faced constant pressure from hawks in the Pentagon and his administration to escalate, as Johnson ultimately did. Would Kennedy have bowed to that pressure? We can’t know.

As an Irish-American Catholic, I was elated by Kennedy’s election. But as a newspaper guy (never a “journalist”), I reject efforts by overzealous admirers to canonize Kennedy, make him something he never was. He was good enough just the way he was.